Eco-Find - Ecologic Search. It's an ecological search because it uses a black background rather than a white one. There's another one that uses the same idea called Blackle. Black apparently uses less energy than white, though Google's research tends to put some doubt on it. I've tried using a black background and have to say its.... odd. Doesn't really work for me.

Zuula Search announced several upgrades to its Internet search service yesterday. They've added results from nine of the video search and hosting sites, such as YouTube, Yahoo, and Metacafe. They've added the toolbar (I must be old, I can remember when these were new, exciting and noteworthy!) and 'Blogdimension' which is a blog search engine.

January 30, 2008

Google Librarian Central is still not happening. I mentioned that there had been no postings since June 29th 2007 and the irony of the last post should not be lost of any of us. In part: "[our] blog team is taking a break to think about the best ways to communicate
with you and keep you updated on what's happening with Google. We're
not leaving you hanging, though."

LibraryStuff then asked the same question, Sarah, the Librarian in Black also wants to know, and Stephen Abram is also keen to know what the situation is. The general consensus (without putting words into anyone's mouths) is that Google is cynically trying to use librarians, and drip feeding us until they think we're no longer important, at which point we get dropped.

It's a cynical view, but an understandable one. Another viewpoint is that perhaps Google is rather less the 800 lb gorilla and rather more a 4 year old child at Xmas who is constantly running from one toy to another, playing with them for a bit and then dropping them and moving to something else.

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens next? My guess is either nothing, which pretty much will show that Google isn't that fussed, or they'll bounce back again briefly to try and reassure librarians. However, in the long term this is going to be a great example to use to illustrate that if you're going to start a weblog, if you're going to engage with a community, if you're going to send out positive signals and then you get bored and move on, it's going to have a really bad effect on public relations.

January 29, 2008

Google Experimental Search. This is been floating around for a couple of days, so you may already have caught up with this one. If not, read on! The link takes you to Google Labs, and you can join a number of different experiments. The ones that they're most excited about at the moment are a combination of 3 - timeline, map view option and info view.

The timeline option displays a graph at the top of the search page which summarises how your results are spread through time. If you click on a timeline bar narrows the results. It's a nice idea and great if you need information at a specific period. The map view lets users visualise on Google maps the key places found in their results. Great for finding locations of conferences, events and so on. The infor view provides a control panel to review information from a page that contains dates, measurements, locations or images.

If you're interested, just follow the link and join an experiment. Other experiments are Suggested terms, keyboard shortcuts, left hand, right hand search navigation. You can only be in one experiment at a time, but you can have a lot of fun exploring.

Delver is a new engine, still in closed beta that I discovered via TechCrunch. The idea with this one is that you tell it who you are, let it find your friends at places such as social networks and so on, and creates a series of results based on stuff they have found and produced. A search for 'New York' will pop up a blog post your best friend Jane wrote, for example.

I'm not entirely sure I see the value of this to be honest. I can ask Jane what she thinks, and I don't need a search engine for that. And Jane may not be right of course - she might have got her facts wrong for example. That's on a silly little thing; I hate to think what happens when we start looking at more serious stuff. I can't honestly see it working well, but to be fair, I've not tried it yet. If I get an invite I'll do some more digging. Just no-one write about New York in the meantime!